Katie Roof and Rachel Metz (in May, via Hacker News):
OpenAI has agreed to buy Windsurf, an artificial intelligence-assisted coding tool formerly known as Codeium, for about $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the ChatGPT maker’s largest acquisition to date.
Nickie Louise:
Windsurf, founded in 2021 by Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, built a loyal developer base with its AI-native coding platform. The company’s flagship product, Windsurf Editor, supports enterprise-grade workflows and enables what co-founder Andrej Karpathy once called “vibe coding”—a kind of low-friction, AI-driven software creation process that’s reshaping how code gets written.
[…]
But OpenAI had a problem: Microsoft.
The tech giant—one of OpenAI’s largest investors with over $13 billion poured in since 2019—has rights to much of OpenAI’s IP under a sweeping 2023 agreement. That includes access to model weights, code, and yes, any IP OpenAI gains through acquisitions. In this case, Windsurf’s technology would fall into Microsoft’s lap by default.
That didn’t sit well with OpenAI—or Windsurf. Mohan reportedly made it clear he didn’t want Microsoft anywhere near the startup’s tech, given GitHub Copilot’s position as a direct competitor.
Hayden Field (via Hacker News):
OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday.
Mohan and the Windsurf employees will focus on agentic coding efforts at Google DeepMind and work largely on Gemini. Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology.
Sheel Mohnot:
One oddity of prediction markets: the fine print matters.
Polymarket had a contract on whether OpenAI would acquire Windsurf before August. They didn’t, but they announced an acquisition, so the market still resolved as “yes.”
Dave Pack (via Dare Obasanjo):
Talked to a senior employee at windsurf and current employees are getting no pay out and are left with shell of a company to “run”. All the cash is going to founders and preferred equity holders.
See also: Hari Raghavan.
Balaji Srinivasan:
After looking into this, I think the original intent was for that $100M+ cash balance to indeed be used to give employee distributions via a dividend. It corresponds very closely to the unvested equity number.
But due to the legal overhead that attends any Big Tech acquisition nowadays, the founder was muzzled and couldn’t say this outright. He could only say “dividending out the balance is an option.”
So: the remaining Windsurf shareholders can take that option, dividend out the $100M to employees, and then choose to shut down the company. The outcome is then similar to an acquisition.
Previously:
Acquisition Artificial Intelligence Business Developer Tool Google Google Gemini/Bard Microsoft OpenAI Windsurf
Sean Heber:
ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.
First Twitter/Elon killed our main app revenue that kept the lights on around here, then generative AI exploded to land a final blow to design revenue.
Pieter Omvlee:
They’ve been such a staple of the Mac indie scene that I can’t imagine them going away. At Sketch we do all our design in-house but if we weren’t, they’d have been the first at who’s doors I’d be knocking.
I would have assumed they’d be booked solid this summer, with all the design work necessitated by Apple’s announcement of Liquid Glass. I’m sorry to hear that’s not the case. If you need your icons refreshed for the 26 cycle, here’s your chance to work with some of the best designers in the business.
Eric Schwarz:
I think what’s especially disheartening and frustrating is that AI-generated “design” is taking over and seen by bean counters as “good enough” even though it lacks humanity and skill. Anyone with an eye for detail will notice flaws or an uncanniness, no matter how “perfect” it is.
Christian Tietze:
In preparation of macOS Tahoe, is a design resistance movement on the horizon?
Like, I don’t want to be part of the “icon jail evasion. Can we play within the jail?
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Business ChatGPT Design Icons iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26
Andrew Yaros (via Marcus Mendes, Hacker News):
LisaGUI is a “web OS” - a website that mimics the look, feel, and functionality of an operating system. More bluntly, it’s a giant JavaScript program which fully recreates the Apple Lisa’s user interface from scratch (to the best of my ability). The Lisa was Apple’s first computer with a graphical user interface (known as the Lisa Office System, or “LOS”).
[…]
Aside from Gulp.js, which I use as a simple build tool to produce a minified JS file, no third party libraries or frameworks are utilized. LisaGUI contains no code from the Lisa Office System’s source code (or any code written by Apple), and doesn’t utilize any component of any emulator, like LisaEm or IDLE.
Previously:
History JavaScript Lisa Web
Local Mess (via Dan Goodin):
We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser—silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.
These native Android apps receive browsers’ metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users’ mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.
This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android’s permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users’ web activity.
Jorge García Herrero (via Hacker News):
Meta faces simultaneous liability under the following regulations, listed from least to most severe: GDPR, DSA, and DMA (I’m not even including the ePrivacy Directive because it’s laughable).
[…]
The Pixel script in your browser tries to send information to the Facebook/Instagram app that’s “listening” in the background.
It uses a technique called WebRTC, normally used for voice or video calls (like Zoom or Google Meet), but here it’s being used to secretly transmit data between the browser and the app.
Additionally, a technical trick called “SDP Munging” allows the browser to insert data (like the _fbp cookie identifier) into the WebRTC “initial handshake” message.
John Gruber:
What they’ve done here may not have broken any laws, but there certainly should be laws against it. And in terms of simple common sense, the entire elaborate scheme only exists to circumvent features in Android meant to prevent native apps from tracking you while you use your web browser.
Nick Heer:
The difference between targeted advertising and spyware is there is no difference.
After Girish, et al., disclosed this behaviour, Meta’s apps ceased tracking users with this method, and Goodin said Yandex will also stop.
John Gruber:
I’ll note that among the so-called “interoperability” requirements the European Commission is demanding of iOS is for third-party apps to run, unfettered, in the background, because some of Apple’s own first-party software obviously runs in the background.
I think the problem is the IPC, not the running in the background. The user should have control over whether apps can open up ports for listening and whether Web sites can connect to 127.0.0.1.
Every one of the sites that includes these tracking scripts is complicit to some extent in the theft of hundreds of millions of Android users’ web browsing privacy.
Andrew Abernathy:
This sort of bullshit is why I use the web instead of native apps from Meta/Facebook/Instagram.
Previously:
Android Digital Markets Act (DMA) Exploit Facebook GDPR iOS iOS 18 Meta Privacy Yandex
